I Called CAA to See If My Agent Still Worked There | Jonathan Goldman | Episode 568

Jonathan Goldman called CAA to find out if his agent still worked there, and the replies to his Threads post said more about Hollywood's middle layer than most trade coverage this year. Jonathan has spent thirty years on the development side of the business. He started as Phillip Noyce's assistant, directed second unit for him, then rose from story producer to showrunner at Thom Beers' Original Productions on series including Ice Road Truckers. Last year he pitched six projects with CAA packaging and A-list partners. One got a development step, and the network passed a year later. Chris and Daniel get their answer about CAA. Jonathan's version is that the people who greenlight shows aren't paid to take risks, in a town that gamblers built. The route there runs through Noyce handing him second unit at Shea Stadium once he'd fetched the coffee, a Phoenix strip club series he pitched as the Sopranos of the Southwest, a Terlingua, Texas murder trial he covered for Nat Geo, and why Obsession, Backrooms, Widow's Bay and Coyote vs. Acme all made the same case for leaving creatives alone. He also predicts the next studio mistake, which is plucking a YouTube director for the full studio treatment and then declaring YouTube filmmaking over when the movie tanks. Guest links Jonathan Goldman on IMDB > Jonathan Goldman on Threads > Jonathan Goldman on LinkedIn > Companies, films and shows mentioned: CAA, WGA, DGA, Original Productions, Fremantle, Warner Bros. Discovery, National Geographic, Apple TV, HBO, Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, A24, Neon, Miramax, Paramount, The Saint, Clear and Present Danger, The Bone Collector, Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, Badlands, Texas, Obsession, Backrooms, Widow's Bay, Coyote vs. Acme, The Bourne Supremacy, Apocalypse Now Premier Sponsor Center Grid Virtual Studio >

Warner Bros. was ready to write off Coyote vs. Acme, and after a sale to another company it has taken in about $85 million as of this episode's release. That sits inside a summer that put $4.7 billion through the box office, a record in dollars with ticket sales still short of the peak, and theaters full of young people lining up for smaller originals like Buddy alongside Nolan's Odyssey and Spider-Man. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins read it as proof that the majors can no longer pick winners. Daniel adds that Neon and A24 now sell what the studios used to sell, an identity people buy tickets on. Daniel said on an earlier episode that if Backrooms hit, everyone should look into SCP and liminal space horror. A24, the studio behind Backrooms, has since taken worldwide rights to V/H/S: SCP, set for a 2027 theatrical release. Daniel says Spielberg is producing The Mandela Catalogue and Siren Head is headed for a major movie, all from a horror genre born on YouTube that the studios missed while they skipped two generations of filmmakers. He expects There Is No Antimemetics Division to be the next book bought for a film. Chris asks whether anyone can own Backrooms at all. The panel also talks through the Paramount and Warner Bros. deal just days before the settlement was announced. AI gets its own stretch, starting with the AI film festival running alongside Venice and the new guild agreements, and turning into an argument over whether the flood of mediocre AI work corrects itself. James says it does. Chris points to ZBrush and its identical alien creatures. The show ends on Daniel's lineup for a Monstrous Moonshine Film Festival, where Stripes and Full Metal Jacket count as the same movie. Tools and companies mentioned: Warner Bros., Paramount, A24, Neon, Spooky Pictures, Image Nation Studios, ZBrush, Panavision, SAG-AFTRA, WGA Premier Sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio >

Kane Parsons was 19, had never worked inside a professional visual effects pipeline, and had taught himself the shots he needed in Blender in his bedroom. Edward Douglas, VFX supervisor on Backrooms (also Long Legs, Keeper, and multiple Oz Perkins films), built the production pipeline to fit him: direct access to vendor files, animation, and cameras, so Kane could work the same way he always had. The film delivered 600 VFX shots inside an 830 shot runtime, on an indie budget and timeline. Chris and Daniel connect this to the same shift they discussed with Peter Timberlake on Obsession: movies built on constraint outperforming movies built on scale. Douglas walks through the CG grounding rule that shaped the film (the practical hat that never gets replaced), the VHS pass every found footage frame ran through, and why horror keeps producing the year's most interesting visual effects work while franchise budgets keep climbing. Guest links Edward Douglas on IMDB > Edward Douglas on LinkedIn > Tools and companies mentioned Blender, A24, Roxel Creative, Zoic, Red Komodo, After Effects, Electronic Arts, BioWare, Long Legs, Pig, The Monkey, Keeper, Oz Perkins films Special thanks to our premier sponsor: CenterGrid Virtual Studio >

Chris and Daniel are thrilled that Widow's Bay is now shooting its second season, and they've brought on Brian Drewes, the man whose team at Zero VFX made the show's VFX disappear, to talk about how they did it. Drewes and his crew are based in Massachusetts, and the show's authentic New England vibe, the peeling paint, the real fishing towns, the moldy-book-smell houses, comes from a team that actually lives there and knows the difference between real and Disneyland-fisherman. They walk through the twin-boat rig, the night the crew knocked on doors across a real town to kill practical lights instead of shooting a split screen, and why the darkest, cheapest choice on set is usually the right one. The conversation turns hard on AI provenance. Drewes is building Somantix, a system for embedding C2PA policy data directly into delivered files. He says the terms of service governing AI tools change almost weekly, and that studios have no central record of which vendor used what tool under what rules. He and Daniel dig into who actually owns the risk when generative tools get involved, and why treating AI policy as infrastructure is the only way any of this makes sense. Brian Drewes on IMDB > Brian Drews on LinkedIn > Somantix AI > Zero VFX > Tools and companies mentioned: Zero VFX, Zinc, Google, EC2, GCE, Dream Machine, C2PA, Somantix, ElevenLabs, TurboSquid, robots.txt Thank you to our premier sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio : https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Nobody thinks Obsession has visual effects. That's the point. Peter Timberlake, the VFX supervisor behind one of the year's biggest indie breakouts, joins Chris and Daniel to break his silence on work so subtle most audiences never register it as VFX at all. The centerpiece is the character Nikki: rather than fighting to escape the uncanny valley, director Curry Barker asked Timberlake to push straight into it, mismatching her facial expressions on purpose so her eyes tell one emotional story while the rest of her face tells another. The result reads as a performance choice, not an effect, and it's exactly the kind of restraint the team wanted. Peter walks through why the studio debated whether to talk about this work publicly at all, and lands on a simple answer: nothing he says can take anything away from the lead actress's performance. Before Obsession, Peter built his career the hard way: driving to LA with two thousand dollars, sleeping in a parking lot, and landing his first industry job cleaning dishes at Framestore. He went on to found his own studio, Queen Studio, in 2018, work at Weta and The Mill, and eventually build the small, scrappy team that shot Obsession in twenty days after blocking the entire film shot for shot in Unreal Engine before a single frame was captured. Chris and Daniel dig into what indie filmmakers can actually learn from this: planning replaces budget, ownership replaces plug-and-play pipelines, and the best VFX work is often the kind the audience never notices. Guest links: Peter Timberlake LinkedIn >  Peter Timberlake IMDB >  Peter Timberlake Instagram >  Queen Studio LinkedIn >  Focus Features LinkedIn >  Focus Features Instagram >  Tools and companies mentioned: Framestore LA, Weta, The Mill, Sony Imageworks, Queen Studio, Maya, Cinema 4D, TurboSquid, DaVinci Resolve, Embergen, Unreal Engine, Arri Alexa 65, Panavision, Peacock, TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), Focus Features People mentioned: Curry Barker (director, Obsession), Taylor Clemens (DP), Haley Johnson (producer), Michael Rolla (comp supervisor, mutual connection), Janelle Croshaw Ralla (VFX supervisor colleague, Spike Jonze collaborator), Edward Douglas (upcoming guest re: Backrooms) Thank you to our sponsor: CenterGrid Virtual Studio >

Easy Rider is not a good movie. It's a chaotic, half-improvised, drug-fueled mess that stumbles for its first half and only becomes a movie in retrospect, once the ending lands. And that's exactly why Chris and Daniel keep coming back to it. Joining them is Richard Crudo, ASC, who spent years in friendship with László Kovács, the film's cinematographer, and brings firsthand insight into how a low-budget biker-movie veteran ended up accidentally rewriting what cinematography was allowed to look like. Flares, handheld chaos, a single zoom lens pushed past its limits, film stock literally dropped in a bathtub. Every mistake became doctrine. The conversation keeps circling back to a bigger question: why does a movie built entirely out of accidents still work, and what does that tell filmmakers chasing polish today? Kovács shot on instinct and natural light because the budget demanded it, not because he planned a movement, and Crudo, Chris, and Daniel trace how that constraint produced a documentary rawness no amount of intentional design has matched since. It's a conversation about permission: what happens when the people trained to avoid every mistake in the book stop caring what the old guard thinks. Reference: Richard Crudo, ASC > Gear referenced: Arriflex IIC, Angenieux 25-250mm zoom, Bolex 16mm, Kodak 5254 film stock, 9-light fixtures Sponsors: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Alana Newell is CEO of Crafty Apes, a company that grew through the worst stretch this industry has seen in decades. She got there the rare way. She came up as a compositor, ran 2D, and took on what was effectively a chief operating officer (COO) role at Rising Sun Pictures because she was tired of watching the end of the pipeline absorb every problem created upstream. Then she went and got a master's in business to understand how the machine actually works. She still holds both jobs. Her read on why most visual effects companies struggle is uncomplicated: the business is people, and the paycheck is not what motivates them. Alana walks Chris and Daniel through the three values she reverse engineered by watching the founders work instead of putting them in a room and asking, the one company one profit and loss rule that keeps a dozen satellite offices from competing against each other, and why agility beats chasing tax subsidies. She makes the case that machine learning is a feature of the visual effects pipeline and not a bug to be engineered out, argues that pretending you do or do not use AI is equally dishonest, and explains why the projects nobody could afford to attempt before are the real opportunity. Plus Wizard of Oz at Sphere, the VES Award for The Residence, Jumanji, the Australia expansion, and why the only operational problem she has never solved is the speed of the Earth's rotation. Alana's LinkedIn Crafty Apes' Website Crafty Apes' Instagram Mentioned in this episode: Crafty Apes founders Chris LeDoux, Tim LeDoux, and Jason Sanford Sphere and The Wizard of Oz at Sphere The Residence, VES (Visual Effects Society) Award Jumanji Autodesk Maya Blender The Backrooms Life of Pi The Odyssey Obsession CG Garage: CG Garage website: https://www.cggarage.com/ Podcast page: https://podcast.cggarage.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mmstudios71 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/monstrous-moonshine Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cggaragepodcast Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mmstudios71 Special thanks to our sponsor: CenterGrid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Spider-Man just posted the biggest opening weekend in box office history, and Chris, Daniel, and returning panelist Todd Perry dig into why, right after a year of everyone insisting the superhero genre was dead. From there the panel tackles Kitbash3D's surprise acquisition of ArtStation and Sketchfab from Epic Games, the strange history of ArtStation's own anti-AI protest era, a visibly shrinking Siggraph 2026 show floor that still delivered on the research side, and the growing push to label AI-generated video content on social media, including where the EU's regulatory reach is headed and the murky line between VFX and deepfakes. In the second half, Todd Perry, VFX supervisor on For All Mankind, pulls back the curtain on the unwritten rules of working on a film set. He's spent seasons quietly compiling a running list of roughly forty five lessons on surviving the day to day chaos of a shoot, from managing the assistant director relationship to knowing exactly when to call for balls and charts. He walks Chris and Daniel through the ones that matter most for anyone stepping onto a set as a VFX supervisor for the first time. Links & mentions: Todd Perry on IMDB > Todd Perry on LinkedIn > ArtStation >  The EU AI Act is Here > Siggraph > Sponsors: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Steven Spielberg doesn't want you to know his aliens aren't real. That's the standard Matthew Butler had to hit on Disclosure Day: total photographic believability, zero tolerance for anything that reads as fantasy, even when the story is about a supposed decades-long government cover-up of extraterrestrial contact. Butler has been Spielberg's go-to VFX supervisor for grounded, "make it real" work since Ready Player One, and before that, he was Chris's first VFX supervisor ever, on The Day After Tomorrow. Back in Episode 557, Chris and Daniel broke down Disclosure Day as fans, tracing its DNA back through Close Encounters and Sugarland Express. This time they bring on the person who actually built it, for a conversation about matching digitally-replaced train sequences to real-world reference plates, a shot count that came in smaller than planned going in, and why the biggest emotional gut-punch in the movie has almost nothing to do with visual effects at all. Butler walks through how Spielberg directs VFX without ever really discussing VFX, and the two of them dig into what makes his process so different: a shot list that shrank instead of ballooning, something Butler says has never happened on any other project in his career, a director who wants to solve problems himself rather than have them solved for him, and a 30-year veteran realizing mid-conversation that the AI moment VFX is living through right now feels exactly like the unsolved chaos of the 1990s. A conversation about restraint, trust, and knowing when the effects work is actually done when nobody notices it. Mentioned in this episode: Digital Domain, James Cameron, Titanic, Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper, Eric Barba, Doug Roble, Janusz Kamiński, Chris Columbus, Gremlins reboot, The Odyssey, Dune Guest links: Mattew Butler on IMDB > Matthew Butler on LinkedIn > Special thanks to our sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Is it a good movie if you have to watch it ten times? That's the question Chris and Daniel keep circling back to as they take on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, skipping the marketing noise and the wireframe-cyclops conspiracy theories to actually ask whether the thing works as a film. They dig into what Nolan is doing as a filmmaker, structurally and emotionally, in his adaptation of the oldest story in Western literature, and why a three hour runtime built around a decade-long wait might be the whole point rather than a flaw. The real conversation is about adaptation itself: what happens when a director spends the entire movie making an audience feel exactly what an intractable wait feels like, and why Nolan's obsession with time connects everything from Memento through Tenet to this one. Daniel makes the case that Nolan has finally figured out how to deliver Tenet's disorienting rewatch effect without forcing anyone to actually rewatch anything. Chris and Daniel also compare Nolan's spectacle-forward approach to what a Denis Villeneuve version might have looked like, and get into why single-vision directors are becoming Hollywood's new IP. Mentioned in this episode: The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan), Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Memento, Oppenheimer, Denis Villeneuve, Dune, Avatar, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Annihilation (Alex Garland), Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven), Inglourious Basterds, Jackie Brown, Frank Gehry, Steven Spielberg, Disclosure Day, Zack Kreger, Ryan Coogler, Hoyte van Hoytema, Wally Pfister, David Lynch, Jack Fisk, Paris, Texas, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Master and Commander, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Neuromancer (trailer) Special thanks to our sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/